Mark V. Albert - emva.net Graduate Student/Researcher Field* of Computational Biology Department of Psychology Program* in Neuroscience Cornell University Room 257, Uris Hall phone: 607-339-8536 fax: 607-255-8433 email: mva6 @ cornell.edu

Research Interests in brief:

• computational perception/neuroscience
• early visual cortical processing
• computational insights into sensory development

By evolution and experience, animal visual processing has adapted to the statistics of our natural environment to maximize both speed and metabolic efficiency. This has lead to complex visual systems with striking regularities among many animal species in terms of early cortical and pre-cortical coding. Many researchers have established the link between the guiding principles of computational efficiency and this resulting neural code.

There are many fundamental insights which can be understood by abstracting these essentials of neural coding. For instance, it has been well known that early primary visual cortex can be partially understood as employing an independent/sparse coding strategy on images of our visual world. My current work involves computationally understanding how such a code can develop employing the same strategy, even before sensory experience.

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* Field: the formal degree program and group affiliation of a graduate student at Cornell.
Department: the de facto collection of faculty and students.
Program: loosely defined... in this case an umbrella collection of faculty, graduate students, and post-docs in many different fields and departments with interests in neuroscience.